Enjoyably Hideous Graphics

[Clownbaby]

Sonic Adventure has to be a classic of bad graphics.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcQhnv2GdzQ

Is it just me or are 3d renditions of Sonic characters just the ugliest things in general? I don't think it would matter how good the graphics were, front-on sonic the hedgehog characters look stupid, like front on/3D Simpsons characters do

[Z]

it's been 15 years since I played an original Tomb Raider, but my memory of the controls was basically QWOP.

Is it just me or are 3d renditions of Sonic characters just the ugliest things in general? I don't think it would matter how good the graphics were, front-on sonic the hedgehog characters look stupid, like front on/3D Simpsons characters do

It's the hair, Sonic has 2D hair.

[Clownbaby]

Oh my fuckin god QWOP I forgot about that

[ErnestTakadichi]

Original Tomb Raider control system was great.  The world was comprised of grids, tapping forward would make Lara take one step, covering one grid square. Holding forwards would cover a different, set amount. Running and jumping all had their own precise measurements.

The rules were utterly consistent, and once you'd learned these, traversal was a breeze.

And I agree that TR was pretty ground-breaking. I remember it being first game where the terrain actually mattered -- where you actually had to look around, to see what you needed to do next, without prompts or glowing visual handholding. Some of it was pretty obscure, too.

In Quake you'd shoot a nearby button to open a door once or twice, but TR's consistent, coherent world was a real step forward.

[Twed]

Agree with that and what Fry said. It's Prince of Persia/Abe's Odyssey movement taken to the next dimension, and I think it's really successful and holds up as a gameplay mechanic today (although people would reject it in a new game, of course).

[Huxleys Babkins]

Agree with that and what Fry said. It's Prince of Persia/Abe's Odyssey movement taken to the next dimension, and I think it's really successful and holds up as a gameplay mechanic today (although people would reject it in a new game, of course).

And reject it, they did.

[Twed]

The remake of Abe's Odyssey technically gets away with it in a modern game, via the nostalgia loophole.

[Phil_A]

Original Tomb Raider control system was great.  The world was comprised of grids, tapping forward would make Lara take one step, covering one grid square. Holding forwards would cover a different, set amount. Running and jumping all had their own precise measurements.

The rules were utterly consistent, and once you'd learned these, traversal was a breeze.

And I agree that TR was pretty ground-breaking. I remember it being first game where the terrain actually mattered -- where you actually had to look around, to see what you needed to do next, without prompts or glowing visual handholding. Some of it was pretty obscure, too.

I agree with all this, it's a shame they they really fucked it in the sequels though, made the maps over-complicated and confusing so movement becomes tedious and frustrating with no clear path through. I think the Thames Wharf level in TR3 is the nadir of this - negotiate a complex series of jumps in order to pull a switch to open a trapdoor on the other side of the map, then go all the way back to the other side of the map to pull another lever which closes a hatch on the opposite side of the map so you have to go all the way back again, all to get about 500 feet from where you started.

And those fucking vehicle sequences, dear God. Why did they persist with those? Someone must have realised they weren't in any way fun, surely?

[garbed_attic]

I have an odd soft spot for how grungy and warped Normality looked:

[gmoney]

Yes! I think about Normality a lot. It was one of the first 3D games I played that wasn't about shooting things and the colours were really vivid and exciting compared to the dark dread of Doom. I don't really want to play it again, as I worry it's not much cop.

[St_Eddie]

Yes! I think about Normality a lot. It was one of the first 3D games I played that wasn't about shooting things and the colours were really vivid and exciting compared to the dark dread of Doom. I don't really want to play it again, as I worry it's not much cop.

It doesn't hold up particularly well but at the same time, there are games which has aged far worse.  I definitely have a soft spot for those early 2.5D games.  Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive are still absolute classics...

[Bhazor]

The new Tex Murphy game is pretty good too. Well with the caveat that all Tex Murphy games have at least two terrible segments in them.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Is it just me or are 3d renditions of Sonic characters just the ugliest things in general? I don't think it would matter how good the graphics were, front-on sonic the hedgehog characters look stupid, like front on/3D Simpsons characters do

Yeah definetly.

Threads like this really hammer home how Nintendo knew how to understand the limitations of their systems and design accordingly; their original titles never felt like they were pushing the envelope at the time, but when you look at them 20 years later they still look good whereas the 'advanced' stuff makes this thread.

[garbed_attic]

I'm currently playing through Sanitarium but I'll definitely move this up the list and play it as my next game.

Hee make sure you stay for the credits song!

[St_Eddie]

The new Tex Murphy game is pretty good too. Well with the caveat that all Tex Murphy games have at least two terrible segments in them.

Generally agreed but I'd be curious to know what the two terrible segments from Under a Killing Moon are?  That's my favourite of the series and there's no Roswell (from The Pandora directive) equivalent in that game, is there?  I consider it nigh-on perfect, personally.

Also, I enjoyed Tesla Effect well enough too.  It's not Tex Murphy's best adventure but is was just nice to have him back (I pledged £150 to the Kickstarter too, so my name is now immortalised in the credits of a Tex Murphy adventure game, so I can die happy now).

There's a new game on the way, which started life as a remake of Overseer (which itself is a remake of Mean Streets) but has since evolved to a proper 7th outing.  It's titled The Poisoned Pawn.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I suppose in a way 3D for gaming was as disruptive for games as sound was for film in that they'd really got a handle on the medium and some brilliant esoteric and adventurous direction and then it gets fucked into a cocked hat by everyone trying to make an obvious superior technology work, there's several steps backwards before it goes forward.

[Bhazor]

Generally agreed but I'd be curious to know what the two terrible segments from Under a Killing Moon are?  That's my favourite of the series and there's no Roswell (from The Pandora directive) equivalent in that game, is there?  I consider it nigh-on perfect, personally.

Eh its been too long to remember specifics or which appeared in which game. I just remember a terrible vent section, a couple terrible real time maze sections, some terrible Myst style fiddle puzzles and some instant kills out of nowhere. I'm fine with deaths in the Sierra style games where its a constant threat but when it come out of nowhere five hours into a game that tends to leave me sour. I really liked the first two thirds of Tesla which had a great hook about the evil ending Tex and holes all over his office. But that stealth section.

Still I'm happy to hear they're still making Tex games. I'd hate to think they'd gone back to their "Hidden Object" "games" they spent a decade working on.

[Z]

The biggest issue with that generation of machines wasn't so much the embracing of 3D as the aversion of 2D. It wasn't until the GBA came out that people began to feel okay making 2D games again.


Hercules on the PS1 is always an interesting one to me.  They didn't even bother doing a game for the Hunchback of Notre Dame despite them being pretty tidy money earners at the time. Disney must've felt that a really ugly 3D game in the long term could potentially do more harm than underwhelming kids with a 2D game?
Tarzan was similarly 2.5D (except the characters were no longer sprites). As far as I can see Atlantis was their first proper 3D game and they were in free fall at that stage.

[St_Eddie]

Still I'm happy to hear they're still making Tex games. I'd hate to think they'd gone back to their "Hidden Object" "games" they spent a decade working on.

That was out of necessity, to be fair.  They always wanted to return to making proper adventure games but it wasn't until the Kickstarter boom started, that they found the means to do so.

[Bhazor]

Yeah that's what I meant. Same with all the talented developers who got sentenced to four years making facebook games by their publishers chasing the gold rush.

Back onto topic. One of my favourite N64 games Mischief Makers (Aka Go Go Troublemakers). Creepy and adorable and grotesque and colourful.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRM9Y8_Is2s

And it let you shake the shit out of some kids.

[buzby]

The biggest issue with that generation of machines wasn't so much the embracing of 3D as the aversion of 2D. It wasn't until the GBA came out that people began to feel okay making 2D games again.


Hercules on the PS1 is always an interesting one to me.  They didn't even bother doing a game for the Hunchback of Notre Dame despite them being pretty tidy money earners at the time. Disney must've felt that a really ugly 3D game in the long term could potentially do more harm than underwhelming kids with a 2D game?
Tarzan was similarly 2.5D (except the characters were no longer sprites). As far as I can see Atlantis was their first proper 3D game and they were in free fall at that stage.

The irony being that the PS1 was actually pretty decent at doing sprite-based 2D stuff as well, with capabilities orders of magnitudes better than the SNES, for instance.

[Sebastian Cobb]

The irony being that the PS1 was actually pretty decent at doing sprite-based 2D stuff as well, with capabilities orders of magnitudes better than the SNES, for instance.

Have you seen someone's managed to get the original psx-snes prototype working?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaIfPuziJ-0

I was quite fascinated about how the original psx copy-protection worked as well; it's just the start of the disc has a jitter - effectively an AM signal in the track that gets read of the laser tracking mechanism. Thinking about it, it's quite surprising that you couldn't get cdr's with this signature baked in.

[garbed_attic]

I really can't imagine being friends with somebody who prefers the first image. I'd always be fighting the urge to slap them.

Simon the Sorcerer 3D still hurts me. I genuinely think its release when I was 14 marked the existential end of my childhood.

Y'see Simon the Sorcerer was the first proper game I ever truly wanted and received as a present. Before then I'd had game-like encyclopedias like Dangerous Creatures and 'Mind Maze' in Encarta '95. I had educational games by MECC which I bought on cd-rom from Staples - games like Museum Madness and The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary. I'd played on my granddad's BBC Micro, getting confused by Life and never getting past the third level of Quasimodo. Around a family friend's house me and a boy called William born the same day as me would trying to work out how to switch on the light in Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide game. I'd watched the older cousin of my best friend play Sonic and when I was really young I'd played Leisure Suit Larry on the computer my dad called "Brain", until I started getting old enough to potentially understand it and dad pretended he'd lost the disc.

But Simon the Sorcerer was the first game I'd seen that looked like a whole world to me and I desperately wanted it. I'd had a go at Police Quest round the house of another one of my parents' friends and it seemed forbidding to me and kind of boring. It was hard enough to get into the police car remembering to check the wheels and put on the seatbelt and then when I actually got to drive the car I invariably crashed it. Simon, by contrast, looked bright and colourful, but also sarcastic and teenagery - almost adult.

It actually turned out I'd been watching my parents' friends' kid play Simon the Sorcerer 2 (so it must have been 1995) and at first I was a bit disappointed when I worked this work... but Simon the Sorcerer quickly won me over. As an irritating 8-year-old I was already regularly quoting Rimmer from Red Dwarf (who I identified with) so Simon just gave me a cooler Chris Barrie character to quote. I was also just about getting into Discworld and Simon seemed to exist within a similar universe, but without any bits that went over my head and - to pre-adolescent me - funnier jokes. The pixel art was both warm and comforting and strange and evocative somehow. The people were clumpy and looked a bit like animated Toby jugs, but with more bristling beards and heaving breasts. But some of the backgrounds were really beautiful. The woods looked deep and dark, every rock covered with moss and lichen, every wall covered with ivy. Some of the environments reminded me of my Suffolk village, but more craggy and desolate. And the MIDI music had the same effect on me as Oliver Postgate narrating Noggin the Nog. My brother gets the shivers when he hears the Secret of Monkey Island theme tune; I get teary when I hear the music from Simon 1's dwarf mine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrSTDStqaFc

I genuinely wanted things to work out for the Swampy! I fantasized about rescuing Alix!

If I had whatsoever been able to draw at 9/10 this is exactly what I would have drawn:



I completed both games several times over without a walkthrough (which is not something I can say for most Lucasarts games - save Day of the Tentacle - and certainly not something I can say for the Kings/Police/Space Quest games).

There was a big gap between Simon the Sorcerer 2 in 1995 and Simon the Sorcerer 3D in 2002. In the intervening time I played all the notable point-and-click games of the era, bought an N64 and spent hours and hours on Smash Bros. with my brother, go really into Bullfrog's output, discovered abandonware and even made a website called 'The Adventure Games Closet' - a name for which I was mercilessly bullied at school - which was first-and-foremost themed around Simon the Sorcerer and had its theme music playing on a loop on the front page.

I was a bit perplexed by The Feeble Files, but spent lots of time discussing its deeply philosophical implications with my friend Luke at school. The art was kind of grotesque, but it felt like it suited the sci-fi setting and while some of the puzzles were pretty obscure, the voice acting was great and enjoyed some of the innovative gimmicks, such as the in-game log that recorded all the criminal activity you committed as Feeble, the protagonist.

The Feeble Files was 2.5D and looked like this:



To keep the money flow going through the latter half of the 90s Adventure Soft released a couple of quick and dirty Simon-themed non-adventure games, which I dutifully bought upon released. There was the almost aggressively pedestrian Simon the Sorcerer Pinball, which could have even been a skin for a previous pinball game for all its relevance to the series.

More intriguing was Simon the Sorcerer's Puzzle Pack, which I actually spent an undue amount of time on. The main attraction was a sliding objects Sokoban-style game called Swampy's Adventures, which I never managed to complete. Most gimmicky was a Tamagotchi spoof called Demon in my Pocket.

However, I was most interested in the Simon-customed Solitaire/ Patience game and a puzzle set called 'Jumble' since both of these rewarded you with video clips from what was to be Simon the Sorcerer 3... then, like The Feeble Files, rendered in 2.5D!



Clips 3 and 4 are from The Feeble Files (released around the same time as Puzzle Pack). Clips 1 and 2 are from what was to be Simon the Sorcerer 3.

There was also, inexplicably, a song called 'Burger Life' which you could unlock, which was due to be included in the game and for which I still remember almost all the lyrics...

BSE and its effects on me meant life is a burger then you die. Nobody knows that Cowrunner's inquest shows that I didn't kill the kid. No burger that can save the universe. I am a special sauce and the world something something good. Place to place. Guilty look on my face but I know I'll change things for the good. I've been knocked down. Moved to another town but I know I'll ??? again.

I think it was a song from the point of view of a guilty burger than killed a child after giving him BSE.

Around this time we got the internet at home and I spent a lot of time on Adventure Soft's website, emailing Mike and Simon Woodroffe to ask about the progress of the game. I remember there was actually quite a lot of concept art for the game, which looked really good.

Then things went silent for a bit.

I was a little troubled by the box art and manual of Simon the Sorcerer 3D when it was released and I immediately bought it. I was overwhelmed by the prospect of not having a traditional point 'n' click interface and so dutifully read through the manual a good three times before I even endeavored to play it. That series meant for me what Chris Ware, Love and Rockets, Jan Švankmajer and Raúl Ruiz mean for me now. Yes, at 14 I had started to discover Kurt Vonnegut and the Manic Street Preachers and other bands and authors and artists who would define my adolescence, but Simon the Sorcerer was my childhood and I had waited years for this.

I am unable to communicate the depth of my disappointment and despair when I was faced with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDxzEbhOc-M

[Ferris]

I always thought Crash Bandicoot looked shit.

[machotrouts]

I think Crash Bandicoot has held up well, so I searched it on Google Images to find an example of it looking hideous for the sake of this thread.



Okay fair enough.

[Captain Poodle Basher]

To play devil's advocate for people bashing TR's controls, Tomb Raider 3 has some fucking dumb parts, especially anything requiring you to use the new sprint feature, and anything that requires quick, precise turns where the controls just won't cooperate with you. Part of TR1's strength is that it's fairly slow paced and gives you plenty of time to examine rooms to plan how you'll traverse them in advance, whereas TR3 has too many parts that require quick, unplanned reflexes which don't lend themselves to the control scheme at all.

I agree. It's why I can't get on with the Uncharted series at all. Far too much action of the "Out of the frying pan and into the fire" variety where you just can't relax for the most part. It's all frantic button mashing which may or may not work depending on split second timing and when you do succeed, you're flung straight into the next frenzied chapter. Fuck that.

[St_Eddie]

Great post, gout_pony!

I was a bit perplexed by The Feeble Files, but spent lots of time discussing its deeply philosophical implications with my friend Luke at school. The art was kind of grotesque, but it felt like it suited the sci-fi setting and while some of the puzzles were pretty obscure, the voice acting was great and enjoyed some of the innovative gimmicks, such as the in-game log that recorded all the criminal activity you committed as Feeble, the protagonist.

The Feeble Files was 2.5D and looked like this:

The main character in The Feeble Files was of course voiced by Robert Llewellyn.  Clearly Adventure Soft had a thing for casting Red Dwarf actors in their games.

I am unable to communicate the depth of my disappointment and despair when I was faced with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDxzEbhOc-M

I'm not surprised that you were disappointed, what with the entire game being in German and all!

Seriously though, yeah, that game's rubbish and unbelievably ugly to look at.  Thankfully, unlike you, I'm not a fan of the first two instalments (I didn't play them until I was an adult and so had no kind of nostalgic attachment to them), so I wasn't horribly disappointed and crushed by the awfulness of Simon the Sorcerer 3D when it was released.

[Clownbaby]

Crash Bandicoot looks really charming now I think. Crash and the bosses all have a lot of personality despite being proper jagged.  The colours are great and the characters are designed to suit the limitations of the graphics. I'm defo gonna get the N-Sane Trilogy at some point but I feel like polishing up the graphics, especially of the first Crash Bandicoot, is a bit redundant. I feel like the bosses (particularly Ripper Roo) don't look as unhinged with soft fluffy fur in the remastered version. I know that what we see with the remastered version is possibly how they were meant to look all along though. Of all the games that needed to be remastered, Crash bandicoot wasn't one if you ask me.

I love that I was given the original Crash Bandicoot by a bloke from my dad's work for free when I was 8 and now it's like £30. Long term bargain. Also it was the first game I ever played, and I remember trying to painfully edge around the pits in the ground because I didn't realise you could jump across them. I did actually manage to edge around them though... it was possible

Pinstripe looks much more slick and evil with points









I guess I just like simplicity. I don't like how games are getting so perfect, which is why I really enjoy hideous/wonky graphics

[itsfredtitmus]

Prisoner of War on the ps2 was fun just to see how ugly they could make the Germans

[machotrouts]

When I played Prisoner of War, back when I was like 12, I got through almost the entire length of the game genuinely thinking that the woman on the back of his jacket was a massive disgusting open wound.